Alan Harris, PhD - Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering

Alan Harris is
a native of Johannesburg, South Africa.Dr. Harris completed his bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics at the
University of Central Oklahoma, his master’s degree in Electrical Engineering
and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, both at the University of
Oklahoma.In graduate school, Dr.
Harris’ work concentrated on optical communications, with a focus in mobile
free-space optical communications systems.Following graduate school, he taught as an adjunct at both the
University of Oklahoma and the University of Central Oklahoma before joining
the University of North Florida.Dr.
Harris is currently an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering
Program and serves as the Electrical Engineering Program Coordinator.He also functions as the vice-chair of the IEEE
Jacksonville Professional Section.

Dr. Harris
first became involved in community-based learning when he taught an
undergraduate course funded by a TLO and UNF Parking Services in which a class
of students designed, built, and tested a monitoring system for a UNF parking
garage. Following this experience, he
participated in the UNF STEM Fellows program in which he redesigned the
Electrical Engineering Senior Capstone Design sequence of courses to be
community-based courses.During the same time frame, Dr. Harris
co-taught a community-based field trip course in sustainable design in which
interdisciplinary engineering students traveled to the southwest of the US and
participated in multiple field trips and design experiences. For the last 3 years, Dr. Harris has been the
instructor for the Electrical Engineering Senior Capstone Design classes and, together with Dr. Paul Eason from Mechanical Engineering, has been
able to secure over $300,000 of funding from Vistakon to continue to expand on
the industry relationship between the senior capstone design courses and local
engineering companies and non-profit organizations.

As a Community
Scholar, Dr. Harris has looked to start publishing results from community-based
engineering courses in archival engineering literature. During this process, he has also participated
in the Engagement Scholarship Program to gain further knowledge of the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning. During this
year, he has co-authored a journal paper covering the southwest field trip class, and is currently seeking
IRB approval (collaboratively with Dr. Paul Eason) to collect and publish data from the senior capstone classes relating
student learning outcomes to community-based projects.